The Dancer Upstairs

John Malkovich has played the film director in three movies already, in Michelangelo Antonioni's Beyond the Clouds, Manoel De Oliveira's I'm Going Home and, most conspicuously, in E Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire, where he was the great FW Murnau, playing up most satisfactorily to my image of how an imperious Malkovich-director ought to behave. He called "Cut" with the word "End!" - fastidious, peremptory and very Teutonic.

The idea of Malkovich directing a film for real is almost too good to be true; it carries with it a sense of some vanity- sweetheart deal somewhere. But really nothing could be further from the truth. Malkovich's first film is a triumphant and terrifically stylish exercise in moviemaking; it has a real identity and signature. He has translated Nicholas Shakespeare's novel about Latin American terrorism to the screen - the screenplay is Shakespeare's own - and the result is a political thriller that really thrills.

Javier Bardem, looking worldly and much older than his 33 years, plays Agustin Rejas, a police officer in an unnamed South American state on the trail of a revolutionary-anarchist mastermind called Ezequiel, loosely based on Peru's Chairman Gonzalo of Shining Path. This uniquely dangerous man is on the very cusp of unseating the tinpot dictators, having apparently captured the imagination of his countrymen, from the highest to the lowest, with terrorist acts and bizarre situationist stunts. Meanwhile Agustin is falling languidly and unhappily in love with his daughter's ballet teacher Yolanda, a beautiful and miraculously unattached woman played by Laura Morante. Rejas has until this moment endured a correspondingly languid and unhappy marriage to a woman whose shallowness is revealed in her belonging to a reading group raving about The Bridges of Madison County - Shakespeare can, in the circumstances, be forgiven this playful touch of literary snobbery.

Rejas's story is Greeneian in a way, but the overtly spiritual sense of dispossession is absent, as is the explicitly political sense. Rejas does not much concern himself with the injustices of the ruling junta, which oddly appears not to be bolstered by the CIA or Tio Sam . They are at any rate not mentioned - making this a very unusual revolutionary situation. Malkovich alludes to Costa-Gavras's State of Siege: there is a videotape of the movie containing an important clue to Ezequiel's whereabouts, but this picture is not grounded in contemporary history in quite the same way.

The world of The Dancer Upstairs is closer to Conrad, with Ezequiel a kind of Kurtz figure whose jungle is everywhere: in the countryside, the farms and the towns. "He's every tick in every clock," says one peasant, riding pensively on the back of a truck. "He's every sun which refuses to set." There are dead dogs strung up on lamp-posts with slogans attached; we see live mutts scamper into market squares with explosives attached to their tails, and cockerels strut about with sticks of dynamite tied to one claw. This is occult terrorism, voodoo terrorism, terrorism taking place in its own secret theatre of defiance. Or perhaps it is magic-realist terrorism, which happens a knight's move away from political reality.

The images and sequences Malkovich conjures up in the service of this are gripping in their astonishing flourishes of violence and in their sheer strangeness. A small boy sits disconsolately on a park bench, finishing up what looks like a packed lunch; we feel instinctively worried, protective - where are his parents? Then we see him hand over his backpack to a baffled stranger in a bar, calling him "papa"; only once the man has taken possession of this bundle does the boy shout "long live the revolution" and there is a sickening explosion, blowing everyone to smithereens including the tiny ideologue himself. A white-clad junta general - and a notorious lecher - leaves his palace in a limo and incautiously leans out to speak to a crowd of sexy schoolgirls. "How old are you?" he leers, and what follows is a nail-biting, edge-of-the-seat shock that wouldn't look out of place in Reservoir Dogs. Cinematographer Jose Luis Alcaine has created a marvellous look for all this, both in the beautiful Andean landscape and the hard, flat colour-tones of the capital city, the site of violence and paranoid delirium.

In this age of al-Quaida, Ezequiel's secular and cerebral brand of Maoist terrorism looks like a fiction from an earlier epoch. But with three suspected IRA operatives currently in detention in Bogota, captured while "observing the peace process" in Colombia, the movie can certainly claim that its tension, suspicion and deadpan gallows humour are not misplaced.

What emerges from Malkovich's movie is that fanatical ideology reduces everything to rubble in the end, especially love. The functionary Calderon (Luis Miguel Cintra) taunts Rejas for his love of Yolanda, a passion for which he sacrifices all career ambition: "She's only a young woman, 70% water, and you could have been president..." I wonder how Malkovich directed Cintra in the delivery of that line. I think I can imagine the musing, menacing way Malkovich would have delivered it himself. His presence simmers and shimmers behind all the dialogue like this.

After the comic triumph of Being John Malkovich, many critics declared that the mighty reputation he was sportingly sending up was actually founded on very little. Well, that's not true any more. He has directed a deeply impressive debut feature, and moreover elicited a superb performance from Javier Bardem; Malkovich has made himself the most notable American actor-turned-director since Sean Penn. If we didn't know it, or believe it, before, we do now. He's a force to be reckoned with.